Apostle Johnson Suleiman, the founder of the Auchi-based Omega Fire Ministries, has been accused of dumping his pregnant lover, whom he promised marriage, and is using the police to silence her. The lover, Miss Stephanie Otobo, is a musician based in Ontario, Canada, who goes by the stage name of Kimora. Miss Otobo’s attorneys, Festus Keyamo Chambers, in a letter to the Inspector-General of Police, said she was arrested on March 3 at a United Bank of Africa branch by heavily armed policemen from Federal Criminal Investigations Department (FCID), Alagbon, at the Anthony Village area of Lagos. She has since been in detention, where she has been denied food and visitation by her lawyers.

Apostle Suleiman and Miss Otobo, according to her lawyers, met in September 2016, when she visited Nigeria from her base in Canada. They began a relationship, with Apostle Suleiman telling her that he had divorced his wife and wanted more male children. The affair grew stronger. Apostle Suleiman made a marriage proposal to Miss Otobo, which she accepted. This was followed by a formal introduction of Apostle Suleiman to her family. On the occasion, the preacher took along drinks and gifts and informed Miss Otobo’s family in Delta state of his desire to marry their daughter.

With the affair gaining in intensity, Miss Otobo abandoned her blossoming musical career in Canada to move over to Nigeria to the delight of Apostle Suleiman, who promised to buy her a house and provide her the standard of living to which she was used in Canada.

So strong was the relationship that Apostle Suleiman made a habit of licking Miss Otobo’s body from her toes to her private part any time they wanted to make love. Miss Otobo also became a member of the Apostle Suleiman’s church, following him around the world, selecting sermon topics for him and choosing songs for his church services. Apostle Suleiman also sent Miss Otobo money on a regular basis.

The pastor’s desire to have more male children, according to Miss Otobo’s lawyers, made him demand that his lover should get pregnant. She subsequently got pregnant. But in September 2016, Miss Otobo visited Nigeria and told the preacher that she was pregnant in a hotel she was lodged in Ikeja, Lagos.

The news of the pregnancy angered Apostle Suleiman, who apparently was afraid of the scandal such could bring. He wanted her to have an abortion and proceeded to give her a concoction, which made Miss Otobo bleed profusely and subsequently abandoned her, calling off the marriage proposal. Miss Otobo later went to Warri, where he met another pastor and told him his story. The pastor recorded her story and started using it to extort money from Apostle Suleiman.

After the disagreement over the pregnancy, Miss Otobo returned to Canada. But Apostle Suleiman got in touch with her and apologized for abandoning her. He subsequently started to persuade her to return to Nigeria. Last week, Miss Otobo returned to Nigeria. Apostle Suleiman, working on a scheme to silence her, paid money into her account and then got the account frozen. It was while Miss Otobo was trying to make a withdrawal from her account, having tried unsuccessfully to use an Automated Teller Machine, that she was arrested on the orders of Apostle Suleiman.

According to Miss Otobo, Apostle Suleiman is a spectacularly dissolute man. He once requested her, she said, to bring her friends along for group sex, a request turned down given that there was a plan to get married.
Miss Otobo, through her lawyers, warned Apostle Suleiman that she has their naked pictures together, raunchy text messages, bank statements, and other implicating items.

They lawyers disclosed that Miss Otobo used to send nude pictures to Apostle Suleiman every Sunday, just before he went on the pulpit.

Despite these, Suleiman called off the marriage proposal. However, Miss Otobo is not willing to take it lying down. She is demanding to be paid the sum of N500million as damages for not honoring the promise to marry her. Miss Otobo also wants Apostle Suleiman to stop harassing her and threatening her life. Her lawyers have given the preacher a seven-day ultimatum to meet the demands or get reported to law enforcement agencies for the threat to her life and face trial for breaching the promise to marry her.

(On the day before he died, Sir John Tavener complained that there was “a notable lack of joy in modern art”Photo: REX)

“In the midst of life, we are in death”

“Life is a creeping tragedy.That’s why we must be cheerful.”

“Our glory lies where we cease to exist.”

Sir John Tavener’s final broadcast on the BBC’s Today programme brought home with force the truths of faith.

“In the midst of life, we are in death” it says in the funeral service. In modern conditions, we are often made to feel that this is not true. The great event with which every life must end is concealed by our culture. Up go the curtains round the hospital bed and we all talk about something else.

So I listened with unusual interest to Start the Week (Radio 4) on Monday. In January, the programme’s presenter, Andrew Marr, though only in his early fifties, suffered a stroke. He has recently returned to broadcasting. His post-stroke speech has the vocal equivalent of a very slight limp. On Monday, this made what he had to say the more affecting.

Marr told his audience that he is not religious but that, as he has convalesced, he has found himself reading religious poetry and listening to religious music. He has encountered “the possibility of sudden death”, and it has changed him. He reads the 17th-century poems of George Herbert and listens to the cantatas of JS Bach. Why might this be, he wanted to know. Why, in a culture which seems less and less interested in the formal teachings of religion, do many people feel that religious poetry and religious music matter more than ever?

Sir John explained that he had recently had a near-death experience. Since he had been ill, he had been looking back on his life a lot. Although he had moved from the Presbyterianism of his childhood, through Roman Catholicism, to a rather unorthodox version of eastern Orthodoxy, he remembered fondly a Protestant pastor of his youth. “Life is a creeping tragedy,” the minister used to say. “That’s why we must be cheerful.”

At first, Sir John’s illness had “shut everything down. God seemed to have vanished”; but then, as he recovered strength, his belief in God and his capacity to compose music – which, he said, had always gone together – returned. Now his music had become “more essential; more terse”.

The next day, Sir John Tavener died. He had Started the Week, but he didn’t finish it. In the midst of life, we were in death.

I listened to the programme again on iPlayer. Now it was charged with greater meaning by the circumstances. Its themes, sometimes apparently disparate, seemed to resolve themselves, as in music. Tavener complained that there was “a notable lack of joy in modern art”. He had just set three of Herbert’s poems to music (they will be performed for the first time next year). He quoted Dante: “All my thoughts speak of love.”

John Drury read out one of Herbert’s most famous poems, Love (III). It takes the form of a dialogue between the unworthy soul and Love (who is God, though not so named). The soul is inclined to refuse Love’s invitation to sit at his table, but Love, the perfect host, persuades him. In the dialogue, said Dr Drury, “Love has fewer words, but they are sprightly. In the end, it is Love that matters.” On Tuesday, the end came for John Tavener.

Being no musician, or even a serious appreciator of music, I cannot judge Tavener’s work, beyond saying how I have always found it – in the literal sense of the word – entrancing. One gets caught up in it. To use a phrase of St John of the Cross, one “dies to oneself”. The concept of dying to oneself makes actual, physical death less terrible.

With his long hair and his almost hippy appearance, his incongruous love of fast, expensive cars and his weakness for the pow-wow drum or a Tibetan temple bowl, Sir John sometimes resembled what, as schoolboys, we called a “pseud”. Like Sir Laurens van der Post (another favourite of the Prince of Wales) or the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, he appeared to tread a fine line between mage and poseur. But if you follow his career, you can see the consistency of a quest which was both spiritual and musical. In his creativity, he may have been restlessly egotistical, yet his beliefs turned egotism into almost its opposite. As he put it, referring to the requiem mass: “Our glory lies where we cease to exist.”

George Herbert, though high-born and ambitious, eventually chose the simple life of a parish priest. He wrote his poems, but never attempted to publish them in life. As he was dying, he asked them to be given to a trusted friend, saying that they were “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts which have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master”. He asked him to read the book and “if it may turn to the advantage of any poor dejected soul, let it be made public”; if not, he should burn it.

Luckily, the friend published, to the advantage of thousands of poor dejected souls ever since, up to and including Andrew Marr. Herbert’s glory lies where he ceased to exist.

For Herbert, that dejection he referred to was important. It was a horrible thing, but also a grace. In one of his most famous and beautiful poems, The Flower, Herbert compares his formerly depressed self to the plant that seems to die, but doesn’t: “And now in age I bud again,/After so many deaths I live and write;/I once more smell the dew and rain,/And relish versing: /Oh my only light,/ It cannot be/That I am he/On whom thy tempests fell all night.”

On Start the Week, Jeanette Winterson quoted Seamus Heaney: “Poetry should be strong enough to help.” “Strong” wouldn’t be the first adjective one would associate with George Herbert’s refined and gentle spirit, but it turns out to be the right one. His poetry helps.

I should have liked to ask Andrew Marr for his own answers to his own questions. What is it that he, an unreligious person, finds valuable in Herbert, the most truly religious of all English religious poets, or in a religious composer like Sir John Tavener?

On air, Marr asked if it were true, as some have said, that only a good Christian could read Herbert correctly. The panel were indignant at the idea, no doubt rightly so, since Herbert wrote for any human being who might need it. But the broader question stands: if people do not believe what religion says, why do they turn to its utterances when sick or dying or in fear?

The obvious, cynical, but not completely wrong answer is “Any port in a storm”. But I would argue that something else is going on, too. The chief message of 21st-century Western culture is one of self-empowerment. With technology, money, know-how, rights, medicine, problems can be solved: “You can do it!” Often this is true. But an encounter with really serious things – and nothing is more serious than death – tells you that ultimately you cannot. When you realise this, the paradoxes that are central to the great religions (especially to Christianity, which is the most paradoxical) come home with unique force. When I am weak, then am I strong; you must die to live.

In our culture, millions of people only think about these things too late, if at all. So the people who think about them all the time are helpful – and brave. Which is good reason to give thanks for the life and work of Sir John Tavener.